Do you remember when you had to write summaries or essays at school? The teacher would inform you that you could not plagiarize your research materials, so they would usually encourage you to "put the ideas into your own words." And this idea of "putting ideas into your own words," is actually a really good practice and habit to have.....
....unless you're learning a language that is really different to your own native language....
I'm currently participating in this mini-challenge put up by my friends over at @the.languagecommunity , and the challenge is for two weeks, to find five new words a day, and write them each in a sentence.
If I was doing this challenge in Portuguese, I wouldn't be writing this post.
As it is, I'm doing the challenge in Russian...
The difficult part of the challenge is not finding the words, those I can find super easy.
The difficult part is trying to create an original sentence in Russian using those words.
So today, I'll admit it, I cheated and posted some sentences from en.openrussian.org
Here's an example of one
Царь был правителем России.
The tsar was the ruler of Russia.
But this is why I have trust issues with Russian and Russian sentences, because sometimes the cases pop in without any good explanation.
The word in particular being "правитель" which means "ruler."
In the above sentence, правител becomes "правителем" which is the instrumental case. But I've only seen the instrumental used in sentences like "я пишу ручкой," as in "I write with a pen."
So... is this an ironclad rule? Is the instrumental case always used after быть in the past tense? Is it the same in the future tense ? Цар будет правителем России?
I really don't know, my level of Russian isn't that good.
It also doesn't help that most grammar explanations online don't have this usage example in there. They're always writing about "I write with a pen" etc etc.
So combine this uncertainty with the fact that there's even more intricacies of case usage, word-order, and completely different words used in natural Russian speech, and you get a cacophony of general blockage in your progress in the language.
All this to say, I definitely need more a crud-ton more input, to collect and repeat native sentences, and to shift my focus to building a different sort of intuition for Russian than how it works in Englihs, or Portuguese.
Пока пока,
Tom
Good point! I have the same issue with Czech even though I'm a native Polish speaker. The cases in Czech are often used differently than in Polish so my Polish intuition does nothing to help me with Czech or even is a trouble. When I'm not sure which case to choose or how exactly will the word look like in that case, I "cheat" by trying to produce this specific phrase in translator and seeing what the output is. I don't think it's bad - I somehow must get used to how it should look like 🙂
I'm learning Russian too! I've never noticed what you're talking about before but now I am also confused about it. Honestly sometimes I just want to give up on the grammar and just hope for the best :D
@Zuza, i dont know whether I should be happy that you as a native Pole also have trouble with Russian, or if I should despair that you also have trouble with Russian. 🤣 But yeah, the translator option is a great technique.))
@Vonnie, I wish you all the best, Russian is very rewarding to learn, but there's a lot of days you really feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall. Honestly, the best thing for me is collecting a bunch of sentences and bringing them to my teacher to look at, and then we try to reverse engineer them.
I'm guessing the "logic of the sentence" isn't the same as English. It happens all the time in Estonian too. For example, in English, we say, "I am older than you." But in Estonian, they say, "ma olen sinust vanem." Or, literally, "I'm, from you, older." (sinu = you, sinust = from you) I found the easiest way to get your head around these scenarios is to ask someone who's a native Russian speaker to translate it literally to English and then memorize it as an "English-ified" construction like I did above. At least for me, it allows me to understand it without memorizing the rule.
@Tom , I mean that slavic languages are generally harder to understand 😂 I also think that it's important to have a lot of exposure so that you can see the patterns 😉
@Joseph, Exactly! You hit the nail on the head. It's especially annoying when they have actual one-to-one translations of words or verbs, but they're not used in the same ways. And I am definitely gonna have to try that English-ified construction technique.))
@Zuza, I definitely need so much more more exposure, it's not even funny.))